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I've said it before and I'll say it again: the only thing that stops me dumping perl entirely for ruby is maturity. If ruby had CPAN and all the oodles of modules (and I guess if I was as skilled in ruby as I am in perl) then it'd be byebye perl.

Sadly [1] though perl's CPAN (which is mostly what keeps me here, but also the maturity of the perl development team - lots of people vs ruby's 1) is lightyears ahead of anything any other language could just come up with overnight now.

Not that I wish to chase you away from Perl, but Brian Ingerson feels your pain and is working with others to create the FreePAN [freepan.org]. It's just started, most of the links are broken, but he does have Ruby content up there. In the process of creating that, he discovered that much of the Ruby Application Archive [ruby-lang.org] (RAA) consists of broken links (much like FreePAN, I suppose:) The RAA is actually just a bunch of somewhat organized links to the download pages for the programs. There's very little consistency and, in fact, Ingy was mentioning that some of the programs in the RAA consisted of nothing more than Ruby code slapped between a couple of <pre> tags so you could cut 'n paste.

The FreePAN is intended to eventually be a clean, well-organized central repository for free, open-source code. Even a Java category will likely appear, if the project continues. But right now, I don't even think you can call the site "alpha". I'd keep an eye on it and, who knows, you may just find your Ruby CPAN.

The other pre-cursor to this is that Ruby has no standard installation procedure - almost every module does it differently. So there's no "perl Makefile.PL", there's no "h2xs" to create a standard module layout, there's no "make dist" so that all modules are created the same, etc.

I feel your pain, but I can live with the installation issue. It's *usually* just a matter of reading the module's README, although I realize that the stuff most people come up with (including me) isn't very flexible. A couple folks from CORE (Colorado Ruby Enthusiasts) and myself plan on getting together to rework mkmf so that it works like Perl's MakeMaker. That's my plan, anyway.

As for a Makefile.PL, the closest equivalent is the extconf.rb file, which does the "make", "make site-install" thing (ass

Learn from the past and don't "emulate MakeMaker". Writing out makefiles is dumb on many levels. First of Perl or Ruby is more than capable of doing everything make can do. And Perl (via File::Spec and others) has portability built in. I bet Ruby has some of that too.

Furthermore, you can only guarantee that a user has Perl or Ruby installed, not make (especially on Win32), so why depend on an external program that offers very little not already available to you in the implementing language?